Duff: Digg website seeks to disarm power users with dramatic redesign

The most popular sites on the Web are not devoted to creating content. The Web has become so vast, so broad and so eclectic, the most popular sites on the Web are those that help you sort through it and isolate things that are actually worth your time.

At one level we have search engines, helping you find exactly what you’re looking for. And at the other end we have sites like Digg, listing items that have been selected by a large community of users.

There is a much older, more conventional name for this practice. It’s called “editing” and it used to be about paid professionals sorting through vast amounts of material and selecting the best bits for publication.

Today Digg.com has 40 million editors. The front page is an aggregate of what makes those 40 million people laugh, smile or think.

The Digg community is incredibly passionate and loyal, to the point where the brand has acquired an identity. Every week Digg founder Kevin Rose teams up with long time co-host Alex Albrecht to drink beer, discuss the most popular stories of the week, and drink some more beer.

Diggnation, the flagship for Internet TV hub Revision3.com exists at the intersection of geek culture and fratboy culture — a mix I thought was impossible until I saw Alex and Kevin do their show in front of a live audience.

After randomly sampling five years’ worth of live shows, I started to see the appeal of Diggnation. The podcast (or vodcast, if you prefer) is a weekly hour of harmless fun. Purposely or not, Kevin and Alex have created a kind of “Digg lifestyle” — where the hosts and their friends fly to popular destinations, book rooms in extraordinary hotels and drink lots of strange beer.

The envy hits immediately, and as you watch, you start to root for them. In a way they’re holding on to the '90s, proving that the age of the Internet startup isn’t quite dead.

Watching Diggnation takes you back to a simpler time, when a guy with a sweatshirt and half a beard could drink beer, write code, travel around the world and spend money like a billionaire, all while running a successful company.

Digg isn’t hurting for traffic in 2010, but their business model needs work. Caroline McCarthy laid out the challenges in her CNET blog last week.

The current version of Digg lives and dies by its home page, the master list of most popular links, a list that is subject to manipulation by a core group of “power users” who maintain a large network of fans and trade influence for traffic.

These users have become de facto editors, dominating the selection of links and determining the content of the all-important Digg home page.

But it’s not all volunteer fun and games. McCarthy reports that in its heyday Digg power users could pull in $3,000 to $5,000 per month by selling their influence.

Digg hopes to change that with a much-anticipated relaunch.

Instead of showing the default list of most popular links, Digg 4.0 would tailor content to the preferences of individual users, hoping to spread the wealth and decentralize power.

Right now, Digg results are dramatic but brief. A spot on the Digg home page can give you a sudden spike of traffic, but the users leave as quickly as they appear and once they leave, most of them are gone forever.

This surge of traffic may make you feel good and create an impressive spike on your monthly reports, but it doesn’t mean much in terms of actual revenue. Right now, Digg is one big community, utterly mercurial, jumping randomly from link to link.

This change would allow users to congregate around specific interests and get to know each other. Power users would gain influence, not by appealing to the lowest Digg denominator, but by becoming specialists in their own particular micro-niche.

This is more valuable to users and more valuable to advertisers.

With the right blend of hype and personalization, this redesign could turn Digg into a long-term source of traffic, and not just a flash in the pan.

THE PAGE STOPS but the blog goes on. Talk back to Michael at michaelduff.net.